In September 1948, there was a huge change in my life. The preschool days of playing long days year-round at the Little House came to and end. The big yellow school bus drove up in front of the house, and I got on. I would be getting on a bus, except for summer vacations, for the next 12 years. I can’t say that I really liked the idea at the time. But I did it, and it apparently worked. Almost 12 years later, I gave a bit of an account of that day in an essay that I wrote just before graduating from high school. I kept the paper, rewrote it for freshman English at Huntingdon College, calling it “Two Days With the Three R’s.” Bill Head, a senior, was editor of the Prelude, a school publication. He was visiting in my room, saw the paper, enjoyed it, and published it in the prelude! My first time in print! Well, I still have it, and here it is:
Alpha and Omega
What is this thing called time? The only time that I can be sure of is now; the only things are the ones that I can touch, see, hear, taste or feel.
I remember that lazy, hazy autumn day as I remember dreams. It was a day in early September, when corn stalks dry quickly, and the sun is still hot, and the sky is all blue, and there is a haze above the trees along the horizon. Doubtless, there had been thousands of days nearly like that day before, but not exactly like it. You see, that was the day that I started to school.
Now on days like that, one’s Mama is usually his best friend. I guess having a big brother does help some, but it’s Mama who knows all the old folks, and knows who to talk to, and tells you where to go, and why you’d better stay.
Mama and I rode the bus to school that morning, and, Wade did too. We didn’t have any car, but that didn’t cramp our style. Away we went, lickity-split, over bridge, bump, dog, mud hole, chicken, and anything else that had the misfortune to be in the road at the time. We occasionally collected a sign or mailbox that was “too close to the road anyhow.”
But we finally reached the school that morning as I have many days therafter, without an accident. Then suddenly, I found myself, due mainly to Mama’s know-how, situated and “orientated” enraptured and possibly captured.
I knew I was in for trouble. She (Mrs. Pierce, our teacher) didn’t give us any hard stuff then, but she said that we were going to learn reading and writing and arithmetic and the alphabet and the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm and I don’t know what all else and we did, too, but not that day.
But everything was going too smoothly. There were lots of other people around me, but I didn’t trust them because I didn’t know them. Then said I unto me, ”I will look unto Mama, from whence cometh my help.” But when I looked, she was gone. So, there I sat, too scared to holler and too big to cry.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. I haven’t graduated yet, but I have seen this thing called graduations, working like a giant meat-shear, fall eleven times, so I know how it works. And it’s just two weeks until I am in the last slice on the other side of the blade.
There will be the Baccalaureate, then there will be the senior trip (oh boy) and then there I will stand, mortar-board and all, getting my walking papers. Then, to that to which I was grafted, and to which I grew, I will be a memory. I, not it, will be a memory.
Then I won’t be too scared to holler, or too big to cry.
It is intriguing how some of the thoughts that have found their way into some of my serious philosophical writing on this website were already beginning to form. The eternal NOW; the question of physicality and the senses.
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